It is more than a little ironic that while plans are well advanced to spend another half billion dollars on preserving the Anzac history narrative, crucial records of national importance are being allowed to decay into nothingness.
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The National Archives of Australia, one of the many Canberra-based cultural institutions to have lost staff, funding and other resources as a result of the imposition of a succession of "efficiency dividends", has warned nearly 200,000 hours of recordings could be lost within six years.
This is because they were made using now redundant analogue-based technology on magnetic tapes with a finite lifespan.
David Fricker, the NAA's director-general, said the records were at risk because the recording tapes decayed and, over time, there were fewer machines capable of playing them back.
"If we lose that tape, we've lost that forever," he said. "It's not something you can rebuild, it's not something you can recreate, it will be gone, erased from our national memory".
The recordings include audio tape of ASIO surveillance operations, scientific research and extremely rare and internationally significant recordings of Indigenous language speakers.
Catastrophe is looming for both the NAA and the National Film Archive given it is expected the magnetic tape recordings will be effectively obsolescent in less than six years' time.
Both organisations are in an underfunded race against time to digitise key elements in their collections by 2025.
The NAA and the NFA are just two of the many institutions, including our national galleries and the national museum, that have been fighting a losing battle to retain pre-2013 levels of funding for half a decade.
Recordings include ASIO surveillance, scientific research and rare recordings of Indigenous language speakers.
While the NAA's audio records are, by virtue of the technology employed in their creation, artefacts of the 20th century, they are vital to an understanding of our broader history moving forward and definitely worth saving.
This is because, as the NAA proved with its digitisation of the service records of Australia's World War I servicemen and women, digital conversion makes the past accessible to anybody with an internet connection.
Millions of Australians, many of whom are redirected to the NAA portal by the AWM's website, have been able to mine down into the wartime experiences of family members as a result of that effort.
It seems absurd, given the first recommendation of the recent Parliamentary Inquiry into Canberra's national institutions was that "the national institutions develop and articulate a shared narrative" while starving them of the funds needed to do so.
Many of this country's languages are already under threat or all but lost, and many more will go without a concerted additional effort to save them.
Preserving our national story is core business for our national institutions, who now find themselves in a race against time against obsolete technology.
The problems the institutions now face to digitise these vast collections could not have been predicted just a few short decades ago, and special consideration should be given to funding this massive task.
Such loss threatens our understanding of who our predecessors - Indigenous and colonist alike - were, where they came from, what they did and the world they occupied.
What is the point of remembering the diggers if we have lost touch with who they really were?
